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The Mirai botnet launched a record 620 Gpbs attack against Dyn last October, but according to new research the DNS provider may not have been the intended target.
A team of researchers from Google, Cloudflare, Merit Networks, Akamai, and several universities released a report at the Usenix conference last week which analyzed the Mirai botnet and found that the attacker was likely targeting gaming infrastructure, including the PlayStation network, but incidentally disrupted service to Dyn’s broader customer base.
Report: Mirai Remains Threat as Hackers Repurpose Botnets
“Although the first several attacks in this period solely targeted Dyn’s DNS infrastructure, later attack commands simultaneously targeted Dyn and PlayStation infrastructure, potentially providing clues towards attacker motivation,” the researchers said. “Interestingly, the targeted Dyn and PlayStation IPs are all linked to PlayStation name servers— the domain names ns.playstation.net resolve to IPs with reverse DNS records pointing to ns.p05.dynect.net, and the domain names ns.playstation.net resolve to the targeted PlayStation infrastructure IPs.”
“The attacks on Dyn were interspersed amongst other attacks targeting Xbox Live, Microsoft DNS infrastructure, PlayStation, Nuclear Fallout game hosting servers, and other cloud servers. These non-Dyn attacks are either ACK/GRE IP floods, or VSE, which suggests that the targets were

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